Same here. VLC UX/UI has been a nightmare from the start, in the early days when it was the counterpart to IIRC VLS we eventually gave up on VLC to use mplayer instead.

Don't get me wrong VLC is an incredibly useful and great software available on many platforms, both UI and UX have improved a lot since the early days but still confusing. This arguably bad UX is the reason VLC is a second class citizen to MPC-HC / smplayer on all the computers I maintain.